Cheetah Digital Reviews

One restroom on the entire floor for 100+ people. The people who sit outside the restroom keep tabs on you. The new management is Hitchcock-level creepy and secretive: They are apparently trying to recreate their old company (Exact Target) that was sold for an outrageous amount of money to Salesforce some years ago. They have even moved Cheetah Digital's headquarter from New York to Indianapolis since that's where Exact Target was located. In fact, the new headquarter is in the same old Exact Target office! You can't make this up. Reality is stranger than fiction. They are also poaching/luring their old Exact Target co-workers from Salesforce, etc., while simultaneously aggressively purging the existing money-making talent from the established CheetahMail/Experian ranks. Some employees are speculating whether the new leadership is trying to replicate the Exact Target sale to SalesForce and make another outrageous profit. Whatever is going on, the management seems to all be in on it. You constantly have an unsettling feeling that they're not letting you in on the shape of things to come. The new Exact Target leadership is an insecure bunch with poor or COBOL-outdated skills in technology and business: No wonder they eagerly bought Experian's Marketing Services business with its plethora of nightmarishly incompatible products and are now promoting the least stable and least profitable one of them all. As expected, the new leadership was completely sold by the Conversen product's slightly shinier UI. The current leadership, who I'm convinced played a role in the acquisition of Experian's Marketing Services arm, didn't do their due diligence. They could have been forgiven for falling for Experian's sales pitch, but now, one-and-a-half years later, they still don't, are unable to or refuse to understand the company. Like Experian, they make a lot of bad decisions and also refuse to listen to their experienced staff. Naturally, the company isn't doing too well as one can deduce amid all the desperate austerity measures taken lately (travel ban, pot luck company parties, diminishing bonuses, deterioration of health care insurance, etc.). The ET leadership has poor management skills: They loathe/ignore/don't understand advice and punishes employees with creative ideas. They are super defensive and can take absolutely no joke, criticism, suggestion. They seek praise and fake smiles from scared employees. If you have what it takes to pull off a fake smile, the leadership will love you. If you have what it takes to spew out inane comments and buzzwords on the ceo slack channel, you may get rewarded with a promotion right there on the spot. In case you're a former Exact Target employee and decide to join the infestation, you can look forward to some good times. But beware! Travel light as you will most certainly also fall out of favor sooner than later. Managers for the embarrassing and laughable flagship "Conversen" product, stubbornly refuse to let experts elsewhere in the company give advice or help them out. They love to headlessly and arrogantly reinvent the wheel, reengineering stuff from scratch without involving in-house experts who work on other, less favored products and other experts who don't have the management's ear. If you at some point would want to relocate from the East or West coasts to the sweat shops in the jungles or to the new Indianapolis/Chicago HQ, you'd have to be prepared for a significant pay cut. If you're a manager, this probably wouldn't apply and you could merrily continue to milk the cow from your countryside mansion doing nothing.

- New management : since the divestment from Experian all of the new leadership has come from Exact Target/Salesforce. They then proceeded to lay off a bunch of employees (despite promising no layoffs), and then back filled those positions with cronies from their old company. - Zero career path: unless you are one of the people brought over from Exact Target / Salesforce, you will be ignored by the new management, often have no idea who you report to, and certainly have no hopes for promotion or advancement. - Decision making : all decisions since the divestment have been made in a vacuum by a small circle of ET folks. Original employees haven't been involved or consulted in any way, resulting poor decisions being made and unhappy clients - Communication : nothing is ever communicated (unless, of course, you came from ET), leading to rumors, speculation and an overall sense of unease. HR, if it even exists, is a joke. All we are told is that leadership has a lot on their plates and no time to communicate. - Lack of vision : the new leadership team holds cheerleading meetings and sends emails full of empty words and fancy project names, but no vision has been specifically articulated and acted upon. When we ask for a roadmap to share with our clients, we are told "it's coming"... and continue to be told that 4 months later.